Annihilation Movie Tie-in

About the Book

The acclaimed bestseller, now a major motion picture from Alex Garland (Ex Machina), starring Natalie Portman

“Once you start this book you will not be able to stop.” —The Globe and Mail

Area X has been cut off from the rest of the continent for decades. Nature has reclaimed the last vestiges of human civilization. The first expedition returned with reports of an Edenic landscape, the second ended in mass suicide and the third in a hail of gunfire as its members turned on one another. The members of the eleventh expedition returned as short-lived shadows of their former selves. In Annihilation, we join the twelfth expedition.

The group is made up of four women: a biologist, the narrator; a psychologist, the de facto leader; an anthropologist and a surveyor. Their mission is to map the terrain, record all observations of their surroundings and of one another and, above all, avoid being contaminated by Area X itself. They arrive expecting the unexpected, and Area X delivers—they discover life forms that surpass understanding. But it’s the secrets they’ve carried across the border with them that change everything.

Annihilation won the Nebula Award (science-fiction writing’s most prestigious prize), appeared on multiple bestseller lists and on over thirty Best of the Year lists, and has been published in more than twenty-five countries. It is now the basis of one of the most anticipated films of 2017, writer/director Alex Garland’s follow-up to Ex Machina, with an all-star cast including Natalie Portman, Oscar Isaac, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Gina Rodriguez and Tessa Thompson.

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Critical Praise

“The real strength of [Annihilation] is its genuine weirdness. . . . Once you start this book you will not be able to stop.” —The Globe and Mail

“Creepy and fascinating.” —Stephen King

“Original and beautiful, maddening and magnificent.” —Warren Ellis

“A gripping fantasy thriller, Annihilation is thoroughly suspenseful. In a manner similar to H. G. Wells’ in The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), VanderMeer weaves together an otherworldly tale of the supernatural and the half-human. Delightfully, this page-turner is the first in a trilogy.” —Booklist (starred review)

“It’s been a long time since a book filled me with this kind of palpable, wondrous disquiet, a feeling that started on the first page and that I’m not sure I’ve yet shaken.” —Matt Bell, author of In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods

“A tense and chilling psychological thriller about an unraveling expedition and the strangeness within us. A little Kubrick, a lot Lovecraft, the novel builds with an unbearable tension and a claustrophobic dread that linger long afterward. I loved it.” —Lauren Beukes, author of The Shining Girls

“In much of Jeff VanderMeer’s work, a kind of radiance lies beating beneath the surface of the words. Here in Annihilation, it shines through with warm blazing incandescence. This is one of a grand writer’s finest and most dazzling books.” —Peter Straub, author of Lost Boy, Lost Girl

“The great thing about Annihilation is the strange, elusive, and paranoid world that it creates . . . I can’t wait for the next one.” —Brian Evenson, author of Last Days

“This swift surreal suspense novel reads as if Verne or Wellsian adventurers exploring a mysterious island had warped through into a Kafkaesque nightmare world. The reader will want to stay trapped with the Biologist to find the answers to Area X’s mysteries.” —Kim Stanley Robinson, author of the Mars trilogy.

“After their high-risk expedition disintegrates, it’s every scientist for herself in this wonderfully creepy blend of horror and science fiction . . . Speculative fiction at its most transfixing.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“A teeming science fiction that draws on Conrad and Lovecraft alike … “Annihilation” shows signs of being the novel that will allow VanderMeer to break through to a new and larger audience.” —The Guardian

“VanderMeer’s novel is a psycho-geographical tour de force, channelling Ballard and Lovecraft to instil the reader with a deep, delicious unease.” —Financial Times

“What a haunting book this is, lodging deep in the memory in similar fashion to otherworldly classics such as David Lindsay’s “A Voyage To Arcturus” … “Annihilation” is so disquietingly strange as to defy summarisation. Read it.” —Daily Mail (London)

“Immersive, insightful and often deeply bloody creepy, this is a startlingly good novel … A major work.” —SFX (UK)